Urban Lawyers: The New Social Structure of the Bar / Edition 1

by John P. Heinz, Robert L. Nelson, Rebecca L. Sandefur, Edward O. Laumann

Overview

Over the past several decades, the number of lawyers in large cities has doubled, women have entered the bar at an unprecedented rate, and the scale of firms has greatly expanded. This immense growth has transformed the nature and social structure of the legal profession. In the most comprehensive analysis of the urban bar to date, Urban Lawyers presents a compelling portrait of how these changes continue to shape the field of law today.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Chicago lawyers, the authors demonstrate how developments in the profession have affected virtually every aspect of the work and careers of urban lawyers-their relationships with clients, job tenure and satisfaction, income, social and political values, networks of professional connections, and patterns of participation in the broader community. Yet despite the dramatic changes, much remains the same. Stratification of income and power based on gender, race, and religious background, for instance, still maintains inequality within the bar.

The authors of Urban Lawyers conclude that organizational priorities will likely determine the future direction of the legal profession. And with this landmark study as their guide, readers will be able to make their own informed predictions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226325408
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	07/05/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

John P. Heinz is the Owen L. Coon Professor of Law at Northwestern University and senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation. He is coauthor with Edward O. Laumann of Chicago Lawyers: The Social Structure of the Bar.


Robert L. Nelson is the MacCrate Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation and professor of sociology and law at Northwestern University.


Rebecca L. Sandefur is assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University.


Edward O. Laumann is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is coauthor of The Social Organization of Sexuality and coeditor of Sex, Love, and Health in America, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Read an Excerpt

URBAN LAWYERS
THE NEW SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF THE BAR

---

By John P. Heinz Robert L. Nelson Rebecca L. Sandefur Edward O. Laumann
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2005 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-32540-8

---

Chapter One
Chicago Lawyers Revisited

There was a time, long ago, when the bar was a largely undifferentiated mass of independent practitioners. Lawyers, whether they were in villages or in cities, worked in small "law offices," occasionally with a partner or two but more commonly alone. By one count, in 1872 only one American law firm had as many as six lawyers and only three had five (Hobson, in Gawalt 1984, 7). In the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, concentration of business enterprise in corporations led to a corresponding concentration of their lawyers in firms relatively specialized to the practice of "corporate law." By 1933, Karl Llewellyn could observe that the "best brains" of the urban bar had "moved masswise out of court work, out of a general practice akin to that of the family doctor, into highly paid specialization in the service of large corporations" (Llewellyn 1933, 177). A quarter of a century later, 20 New York firms had 50 or more lawyers (Smigel 1969, 358). At that time, however, the majority of American lawyers still practiced alone. In 1948, about 61 percent were in solo practice (Sikes 1972, 10-12). As late as 1967, of 143,000 law firms in the United States, 122,000 consisted of a sole practitioner (Census 1970, cited in Abel 1989, 304).

Sole practitioners, commonly referred to as "solos," and corporation lawyers practicing in large firms are the polar opposites of the legal profession. They represent the extremes of the hierarchies that separate lawyers and sort them into distinct social and professional roles. But there is a considerable range of variety between these extremes-lawyers employed by government, local, state, and federal; lawyers who work in banks, software companies, or real estate firms; lawyers employed by labor unions; lawyers practicing in small firms that specialize in personal injury or divorce or criminal law; lawyers practicing in quite different small to medium-sized firms that specialize in intellectual property, bankruptcy, or admiralty; public defenders, who represent poor people accused of crimes; neighborhood legal services lawyers, who represent poor people with any of a wide variety of legal problems; "cause lawyers" who represent the National Abortion Rights Action League or the National Right to Life Committee; and, importantly, lawyers engaged in work other than the practice of law.

Despite the diversity of these roles, however, during most of the twentieth century some factors tended to pull American lawyers together, to give them a common professional identity. One of these factors was their shared social status and social origins. In spite of lawyer jokes (Galanter 1998) and antipathy toward "shysters" and "ambulance chasers," lawyers as a whole enjoyed the prestige of membership in one of the traditional "learned professions." Their years of education, usually at institutions of some substantial repute, conferred authority and standing. They were required to pass a licensing examination, the "bar exam," more rigorous at some times and places than at others (Abel 1989), but generally designed to weed out incompetents. Lawyers were also, by and large, drawn from a relatively narrow stratum at or near the top of the American social order. Their parents had usually held professional or managerial positions (Heinz and Laumann 1982, table 6.3, 190), and the lawyers themselves were relatively wealthy, overall, although there was always considerable inequality in lawyers' earnings. Thus, the privileged social and economic standing of American lawyers tended to set them apart and to give them a shared identity as members of a professional elite.

This socioeconomic exclusivity was reinforced by racial, ethnic, religious, and gender exclusivity as well. For much of the twentieth century, American lawyers were disproportionately likely to be white, male, Protestant, and of northern European ancestry (Yale Law Journal 1964; Auerbach 1976). They grew up in similar neighborhoods, attended similar schools, and worshiped at similar churches. Not surprisingly, these backgrounds led them into relatively homogeneous social networks. Their friends and professional colleagues tended to be much like them (Heinz and Laumann 1982, chap. 7). Job openings in the legal profession were routinely filled through the "old-boy network." When lawyers did not fit the standard profile-as, for example, by being female or Jewish-they tended to pursue distinct career paths, gravitating toward settings and specialties where they were disproportionately concentrated with others who shared their characteristics (Carlin 1962; Ladinsky 1963a, 1963b). By the middle of the twentieth century, Jews had succeeded in entering the bar in substantial numbers, but they often did not have access to the most prestigious firms and the most highly valued specialties. Women did not enter the profession in great numbers until the last quarter of the century, and the degree of their integration into the institutions of the bar is one of the subjects dealt with in this book.

The shared family backgrounds, education, and life experiences of American lawyers tended to give them a common outlook on social and political issues. In spite of their representation of varying clientele, often with opposing interests, lawyers displayed a surprising degree of unanimity on issues of the day. A 1975 study of Chicago lawyers, for example, found that 87 percent of a random sample agreed with the proposition that "all Americans should have equal access to quality medical care regardless of ability to pay" and 78 percent endorsed the view that "one of the most important roles of government is to help those who cannot help themselves, such as the poor, the disadvantaged, and the unemployed" (Heinz and Laumann 1982, table 5.1, 139). Lawyers tended to be more liberal than persons in other occupations of comparable socioeconomic status (Laumann, Marsden, and Galaskiewicz 1997), and their characteristic regard for "due process" and civil liberties separated them from the general population.

In addition to the social factors that drew lawyers together, a set of distinct professional interests gave lawyers common cause, and an increasing range of organizational activities gave them opportunities to meet and pursue their objectives. The American Bar Association was founded in 1878, and in the twentieth century it grew into a large and powerful organization (Rutherford 1937; Melone 1977). State and local bar associations, which sponsored numerous (virtually constant) discussions of professional concerns, also burgeoned (Halliday 1987; Powell 1988). One of the common interests of lawyers (or, at least, of many lawyers) was preventing other occupations from trespassing on the market for lawyers' work-that is, preventing the "unauthorized practice of law." For many years, lawyers attempted to prohibit real estate agents and title insurance companies from preparing the documents needed for a sale of property. More recently, law firms have been concerned about "legal work" done by accounting firms (see chap. 12). Thus, the maintenance of boundaries between law and other, potentially competing occupations was an interest that many lawyers shared (Abbott 1988). Many also had an interest in building networks for the referral of cases from general practitioners to specialists or from one sort of specialist to another. A broad range of contacts thus served the needs of both the generalists and the specialists, and these ties provided communication among lawyers and tended to reinforce the integration of the bar.

There is reason to believe, however, that many of the factors that once produced cohesion among lawyers now have less force. This book examines evidence suggesting that the bar is not as unified-in its social characteristics, its political values, or its professional interests-as was once the case. Indeed, the evidence may suggest that the legal profession is now dividing into several distinct occupations. But the demise of the bar has been forecast so many times, prematurely, as to give us pause. The relativity of judgments about the nature and degree of change in the character of the bar-for example, about whether the bar has become less professional or more bureaucratic-becomes strikingly apparent as soon as one examines nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentary, such as the quotation from Lord Bryce that is an epigraph to this book (see also Gordon 1988; Solomon 1992).

We assess, here, the nature and degree of change in the Chicago bar over a twenty-year period. Most of the evidence is drawn from two surveys, the first conducted in 1975 and the second in 1994-95. In each, personal interviews were conducted with a random sample consisting of nearly eight hundred lawyers drawn from all types of practice. The two samples are independent cross sections. That is, the same lawyers were not reinterviewed; therefore, this is not a "panel" study. Both samples include solo practitioners, lawyers in firms, corporate house counsel, government lawyers, public defenders, judges, law professors, and lawyers who were retired, unemployed, or engaged in occupations other than law.

Although the book principally relies on the comparison of data from the two Chicago surveys, we also draw on other scholarly literature on lawyers and on press reports in order to present a broader picture. Because the 1975-95 period is not a long historical frame, we would not expect all of the changes that are interesting and important to have run their course within that time. Indeed, the trends of major significance certainly had identifiable antecedents before 1975 and continuing developments after 1995, and we will want to attend to those where they help to complete the story.

The findings from the 1975 survey were reported and interpreted in a previous book (Heinz and Laumann 1982), which argued that much of the differentiation within the Chicago bar could be understood as a distinction between lawyers who represented large organizations and those who represented individuals or the small businesses owned by individuals: "The two kinds of law practice are the two hemispheres of the profession. Most lawyers reside exclusively in one hemisphere or the other and seldom, if ever, cross the equator" (319). The more cautious passages of that work acknowledged that "the client type distinction is too crude and too simple to account for the full complexity of the social structure of the profession" and that there were, "in some respects, larger differences within the hemispheres than between them" (321), but the "two-hemispheres" metaphor captured the attention of the book's audience and the image has become a frequent point of reference in the scholarly literature.

The 1995 survey, then, provides data with which we can evaluate the validity (or the continuing validity) of the "two-hemispheres" hypothesis. As we have noted, there are reasons to think that the legal profession was less cohesive in the 1990s than in the 1970s. While urban lawyers may well have become subdivided into smaller clusters, however, the division between the two classes of clients-between large organizations, on one hand, and individuals and small businesses, on the other-endures. Note that this distinction, unlike wealth, is conceived of as a dichotomy. Organizational size is a matter of degree, of course, but the distinction between organizations and individuals is a matter of substance as well as form. One might argue that small corporations, even publicly held ones, are more akin to partnerships than they are to large corporations, but the difference in form has legal content, and it alters the nature of the lawyers' work and the relationship between lawyer and client. Where the owners of corporations (the shareholders) are distinct from the management of the company, lawyers' relationships with management are more difficult and ethically complex than are lawyers' relationships with owner-operators. Corporations issue securities, and they are subject to a multiplicity of reporting requirements at the federal, state, and local levels. Moreover, corporations pay corporate tax, and the rules and procedures differ from those that apply to the taxation of individuals. Other large organizations (governmental institutions, labor unions, trade associations, professional organizations) are also subject to special rules and reporting requirements, and lawyers' relationships with these clients are often more akin to their relationships with corporations than to those with individual clients.

Lawyers employed by large law firms do, of course, handle legal work for individuals as well as for corporations-often for the individuals who are officers of their corporate clients. Some large firms have probate departments, many handle individual income tax problems for favored clients, and a few will even work on clients' divorces. To the extent that this occurs, the corporate and the personal client sectors of the bar are drawn closer. But there is a division of labor within these firms, and the lawyers who do the corporate work may not be the same ones who handle personal matters. If lawyers' work has become increasingly specialized-if lawyers who do securities work are now less likely to do probate or commercial law as well-this will tend to separate the sectors of the bar. Fewer lawyers will cross the boundaries.

Lawyers can, of course, be sorted in other ways. For example, one might distinguish trial lawyers or "litigators" from office lawyers, or "employed" lawyers (i.e., corporate house counsel and government lawyers) from independent practitioners who work in law firms or in solo practice. In her study of solo and small-firm lawyers in metropolitan New York, Carroll Seron (1996) divided the sample into "entrepreneurs," "experimenters," and "traditionalists," based primarily on the nature of their business practices. John Hagan and Fiona Kay's (1995) study of lawyers in Toronto and in the province of Ontario used a typology that categorized practitioners by the degree to which they possessed "autonomy" and social power (35-40). All of these distinctions may well be useful, depending on one's analytic purpose.

In part (but by no means entirely) because of an increase in demand for lawyers' services (Sander and Williams 1989), the bar grew very substantially during the last decades of the twentieth century. The number of lawyers in the United States increased from about 355,200 in 1970, one for every 572 persons in the population (Sikes, Carson, and Gorai 1972, 6, table 2), to about 1,066,000 in 2001, one per 264 persons (Carson 2004). In Cook County, the number of resident lawyers increased from 19,072 in 1976 (Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission 1977, 1) to 35,704 in 1994 (Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission 1995, 5), an increase of 87 percent, while the county's population decreased modestly. Overall, expenditures on legal services in the United States increased by 309 percent between 1972 and 1992.2 This rate of increase was twice that of the gross national product during the same period and even exceeded the percentage increase in spending for health services (Litan and Salop 1992, 2 and fig. 1).

The increase in the scale of the profession-both in the size of the organizational units and in overall size-also tends to weaken the coherence of the bar. That is, as the numbers grow, the probability of chance transactions between any given pair or any given sets of lawyers decreases. Since individual lawyers' circles of acquaintance are unlikely to expand to the same extent as the growth of the bar, there will be an increasing number of their fellow lawyers with whom they have no ties. Thus, communication is likely to be restricted to more narrow slices of the whole. The bar, therefore, has become more diverse and less well integrated.

The rapid growth of large law firms unsettled established ways of doing business, and to some extent presented new options for firm management. Some firms aggressively expanded, opening or acquiring multiple offices in the United States and abroad, and "rationalizing" or bureaucratizing their management structure with professional managers and an elaboration of formal procedures. Other firms grew slowly if at all, remained local or regionally based, and retained a more informal, more personal management style. These organizational strategies were often shaped by the particular market or clientele that the firm sought to reach and by the firm's specialties (see chapter 5). For example, a firm specializing in litigation will usually have a higher ratio of junior lawyers and paralegals to senior lawyers than a firm specializing in tax work (Kordana 1995). Preparation for complex litigation often involves sifting and sorting through mounds of documents, a task that may be efficiently performed by relatively less experienced labor, while the client who seeks tax advice is buying individualized expertise and judgment. Moreover, as organizations grow, they are likely to adopt a clear division of labor. Instead of being built around dominant seniors, they create departments defined by substantive expertise or skill types-for example, tax, litigation, real estate, or mergers and acquisitions. (Continues...)

---

Excerpted from URBAN LAWYERS by John P. Heinz Robert L. Nelson Rebecca L. Sandefur Edward O. Laumann Copyright © 2005 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

Preface

Part I The Professions of the Bar

Chapter 1 Chicago Lawyers Revisited

Prior Research

The Data

The Issues

Chapter 2 The Changing Character of Lawyers' Work

with Ethan Michelson

The 1975 "Two-Hemispheres" Finding: Methodological Issues

1995 Patterns of Co-practice

Specialization by Field

Client Differentiation by Field

Allocation of Time in 1975 and 1995

Conclusion

Chapter 3 Integration and Separation

Integrative Mechanisms

Bar Associations

Law School Stratification

Ethnoreligious Differences

Race, Gender, and Family Background

Practice Setting

Structure and Opportunity

Part II The Hierarchies of the Bar

Chapter 4 Prestige

Three Theories of Honor

Prestige

Determinants of Prestige

Core Economic Values, or Professional Purity

Participation in Prestigious Work

Conclusion

Chapter 5 Organizations

The Economic Dominance of Large Law Firms

Organization-Linked Advantage

A Typology of Law Firms

Democracy and Participation

Professional Autonomy

Determinants of Compensation

Changing Management Policies

Organizing Principles

Hours Worked

Task Structure

Change and Continuity

Chapter 6 Careers

with Kathleen E. Hull

Work History and Careers

Career Stability

The Golden Age and Its Fading

Paths to Eminence in the Profession

Lawyers Not Practicing

Conclusion

Chapter 7 Income and Income Inequality

Structural Sources of Inequality

Nonpracticing Lawyers

Individual-Level Correlates of Income

Equal Justice

 

Part III Lawyers' Lives

Chapter 8 Divided Opinions

with Monique R. Payne

The Chicago Data

Differences among Types of Lawyers

Adaptation to Client Values?

Social Values

Conclusion

Chapter 9 Community Roles

with Paul S. Schnorr

The Chicago Data

Overall Participation

Correlates of Overall Participation

Who Participates Where?

Correlates of Participation by Organization Type

Leaders

Conclusion

Appendix: Period, Age, and Cohort Effects

Chapter 10 Connections within the Bar

The 1975 Networks

The 1995 Networks

The Structure of the Networks

Ethnoreligious and Political Divisions

Conclusion

Appendix: Notables' Biographies (as of 1994-95)

Chapter 11 A Satisfying Profession?

with Kathleen E. Hull and Ava A. Harter

Research on Job Satisfaction

The Chicago Findings

Happy Hour at the Bar?

Part IV Transformation

Chapter 12 The Processes of Change

Autonomy and Influence

The Decline of Professional Dominance

Demand

Reasons for Growth

Changes in Firm Structure and Management

Lawyer-Client Relationships

Organizational Boundaries

Business Methods

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Almost a quarter century ago, John Heinz and Edward Laumann set a new standard for the scientific analysis of major social institutions with their landmark study of the Chicago bar. Urban Lawyers will be indispensable for anyone interested in the legal profession and for scholars throughout the social sciences engaged in the study of how institutions-and the networks, firms, and professions they comprise-evolve over time."

Paul DiMaggio

"Like its predecessor, Urban Lawyers is an excellent and important book. The authors have gathered a vast amount of high-quality data and have painstakingly analyzed it from a variety of angles. The result is a detailed and wide-ranging map of the legal profession during a period of transition. The book will be of great interest to scholars of the legal profession and of the professions more generally. Indeed, it will serve as an indispensable reference point for future research in these areas."

AJS - Elizabeth H. Gorman

"This landmark study of Chicago lawyers documents dramatic changes over two decades: increasing diversity in both social origins and practice settings, accompanied by rising specialization, declining autonomy, and reduced professional authority and integration. Centering attention on the rising influence of large law organizations in shaping legal careers and practice patterns, Urban Lawyers engages the attention of readers interested in modern organizations and professions as well as in the evolution of contemporary legal practice."

Peter Marsden

"With this twenty-year update, the best snapshot of American lawyers has become a major motion picture. It is theoretically trenchant, methodologically highly sophisticated, and scrupulously careful.  Essential reading for anyone interested in seeking to understand the future of the legal profession from a close reading of its immediate past."
—Richard L. Abel, editor of Lawyers: A CriticalReader

Richard L. Abel

The empirical data presented in Urban Lawyers provides readers with a clear-eyed picture of the changes that are reshaping the legal profession. . . . Urban Lawyers offers powerful stuff, especially for law students anxious about entering an increasingly difficult marketplace. In a truly important and memorable study, the volume provides a precise and nuanced assessment of the modern legal profession, in all its empirical complexity.

Legal Affairs - William Henderson

"Urban Lawyers is essential for anyone seeking to understand how the American legal profession reached where it is today and to predict where it may be in years to come. From a cautiously scrutinized empirical base of research data and interviews of Chicago lawyers, these accomplished researchers have compiled an authentic overview of the urban bar in the United States."

Robert MacCrate

"An original, provocative study of how the law profession has changed over the past thirty years. The authors argue that this transformation has been driven largely by changes in corporate clients, who over time have grown bigger and have shifted away from manufacturing toward financial and service industries. Lawyers are now more likely to develop specialties and to work in large law firms—trends that have altered their legal work, compensation, and stratification in dramatic ways. Urban Lawyers shows that professions are dynamic institutions that can be changed as their economic and organizational environments are transformed."

Neil Fligstein

Like its predecessor, Urban Lawyers is an excellent and important book. The authors have gathered a vast amount of high-quality data and have painstakingly analyzed it from a variety of angles. The result is a detailed and wide-ranging map of the legal profession during a period of transition. The book will be of great interest to scholars of the legal profession and of the professions more generally. Indeed, it will serve as an indispensable reference point for future research in these areas.

— Elizabeth H. Gorman

AJS

The empirical data presented in Urban Lawyers provides readers with a clear-eyed picture of the changes that are reshaping the legal profession. . . . Urban Lawyers offers powerful stuff, especially for law students anxious about entering an increasingly difficult marketplace. In a truly important and memorable study, the volume provides a precise and nuanced assessment of the modern legal profession, in all its empirical complexity.”

— William Henderson

Legal Affairs